Category Archives: Space & Astronomy

In a first for the West Coast, an Atlas 5 rocket boosted a robotic Mars lander into space Saturday, the first step in a six-and-a-half month voyage to the red planet for a two-year, $1 billion mission to monitor marsquakes, probe the temperature of the core and map the planet’s hidden interior. The spacecraft reached orbit 13 minutes […]

Speed is relative. We know how far the Earth is from the Sun, and we know that it takes one year to make a complete circuit. We also know that speed equals distance divided by time, so by dividing the calculated circumference (in kilometers) by the number of hours in a year, we get our […]

UY Scuti is a red hypergiant and pulsating star in the constellation Scutum. It is currently the largest known star. First cataloged in 1860 by German astronomers, the star has an estimated radius of 1,708 solar radii (1.188×109 kilometres; 7.94 astronomical units); thus a volume nearly 5 billion times that of our Sun. A hypothetical object travelling […]